☆☆☆½
It's often loud, overbearing and hyperactive, but just as frequently Uncut Gems is audacious, creative, involving and suspenseful. The real question is whether the good qualities outweigh the difficult ones, and to answer that requires looking at the movie's last 30 or so minutes, which are magnificent.
Does that final stretch justify the uncomfortable, often confusing, jumble that precedes it? Maybe. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie take a layered, complex approach to telling what could be a simple story. Their Robert-Altman-meets-Martin-Scorsese approach demands attention -- the story develops on the sides of the frames and finally coalesces toward the center, and there is almost never a moment when the movie is capable of slowing down. It's no wonder people get exhausted to the point of leaving the theater or falling asleep: Uncut Gems requires active effort in the same way as talking to a hyperactive 3-year-old.
The story sometimes defies credulity. None of it would happen but for one stupid, in-the-moment decision that jeweler Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) makes, and some other unlikely scenarios ask that you just ignore them. That's easy to do in a film that won't slow down, that screams almost every line of dialogue. This is how these characters live their lives, flailing about in the hope that no one will notice their desperate moves. The story involves Howard's fixation on a large, uncut set of opals, and his obsession with gambling, and everything leads up to inventive, tense filmmaking backed by a love-it-or-hate-it score (I loved it) and played by a cast that is perfectly unlikeable.
There's no one to root for in Uncut Gems, no one to pin your hopes on, nothing at all to like about these people, the way they live, or their cheap obsession with material wealth -- but if you're going to make a movie like this, you might as well go all the way. The Safdie Brothers go all the way with Uncut Gems ... and then they go a little further.
Viewed Jan. 10, 2020 -- AMC Universal
1920
Does that final stretch justify the uncomfortable, often confusing, jumble that precedes it? Maybe. Directors Josh and Benny Safdie take a layered, complex approach to telling what could be a simple story. Their Robert-Altman-meets-Martin-Scorsese approach demands attention -- the story develops on the sides of the frames and finally coalesces toward the center, and there is almost never a moment when the movie is capable of slowing down. It's no wonder people get exhausted to the point of leaving the theater or falling asleep: Uncut Gems requires active effort in the same way as talking to a hyperactive 3-year-old.
The story sometimes defies credulity. None of it would happen but for one stupid, in-the-moment decision that jeweler Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) makes, and some other unlikely scenarios ask that you just ignore them. That's easy to do in a film that won't slow down, that screams almost every line of dialogue. This is how these characters live their lives, flailing about in the hope that no one will notice their desperate moves. The story involves Howard's fixation on a large, uncut set of opals, and his obsession with gambling, and everything leads up to inventive, tense filmmaking backed by a love-it-or-hate-it score (I loved it) and played by a cast that is perfectly unlikeable.
There's no one to root for in Uncut Gems, no one to pin your hopes on, nothing at all to like about these people, the way they live, or their cheap obsession with material wealth -- but if you're going to make a movie like this, you might as well go all the way. The Safdie Brothers go all the way with Uncut Gems ... and then they go a little further.
Viewed Jan. 10, 2020 -- AMC Universal
1920
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